UK Government Sponsors a Data Mashup Contest

This could be interesting – the UK government is sponsoring a Show Us a Better Way contest.  Basically they are running a contest where you can submit ideas to which make better use of public information in the form of mashups, KPIs, visualisations etc.  The site points you to a variety of public data which you can use for your prototype and the how-to post gives example of some of the development frameworks you might use, for example Popfly or Yahoo Pipes. 

And there’s a £20,000 prize up for grabs! According to the site faqs the closing date is end of September 08.

Technorati tags: mashup, government, popfly, yahoo pipes google code

SharePoint Server 2007 Search Federation

Arpan Shah has a post about availability of Federated Search for SharePoint 2007.  Right now federated search is only available for Search Server 2008/Express – what this does is allow you to pass queries to other search engines (Live Search, Wikipedia etc) and get the results back alongside your crawled and indexed SharePoint searches.  This feature can be very useful, particularly as you can create your own Federated Search connectors.

Arpan says the federation features will be publicly available for SharePoint 2007 as a “rollup” in early July.  His post also includes a link to a good PowerPoint presentation on Search Server 2008 which you can download here.  In the presentation there is a link to the Search Community Toolkit on CodePlex.  There’s some useful stuff here as well, including some ASP.Net Search controls which you can use to connect to the search web service on SharePoint Server 2007.

Technorati tags: sharepoint, search server, federated Search

Refactor! for ASP.Net

Over the past couple of months I’ve had to do a fair bit of ASP.Net work.  One of the time-consuming areas when using ASP.Net controls is moving display properties to a CSS class rather than spreading them liberally inside the control itself.  Developer Express provide a free download of Refactor! for ASP.Net to help with this, and a whole load of other refactorings – well worth downloading if you use Visual Studio 2005 for ASP.Net development. 

It works with Visual Studio 2005 and the new Orcas beta 1.  You can download here.  If you want to read a little more about it there is a good post on Mark Miller’s blog.

Technorati tags: refactor, Developer Express, asp.net